Trivia Night Victory!

JLA and Mandi posing with my team's trophy

That's right my trivia team won the ESP trivia night competition here at SCC. My teammates were:

1. Gabe Harber
2. Anna Leeper
3. Marvin Tobias
4. Marvin's Wife
5. Marvin's Son
6. Lisa Stoner
7. Kate Weber
8. and Me

We had a fantastic game, scoring 92 out of 100 (Of course we got an A). Categories included: State Quarters, Candy, Sports Mascots, TV Theme Songs, Musicals, and Flags of the World. We had a great time, and raised money for a great cause! If you think you can beat my team next year I invite you to be disappointed.

SoTL: Maryville SoTL Conference 2012

Last weekend I attended a conference hosted by Maryville University. The theme of the conference was Integrating the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Into Academic Culture. I like teaching conferences; all too often teaching is a lonely pursuit. I go to my classes I do my thing, I kvetch with my colleagues about students, but often the actual planning and execution of a class occurs in a vacuum.  That is to say that we (teachers) rarely share or collaborate with each other on topics like course design and classroom management. So teaching conferences are a great way to meet with other teachers and talk about what we do and discover better ways to do it.

In the keynote address Peter Felton (Elon University) asked us the question, "How intentional are you towards your course?" I feel that over the last four years I've done so much to try and transform my course into a student-centered learning experience, so I'd say I'm fairly intentional. I am primarily teaching a general education required course, so there are a lot of topics that I must address, but I feel that I go a long way to bring education to my students in innovative ways (with varying degrees of success). But I think this is a great and fundamental question that we (still teachers) can all use to evaluate our efforts.

Another workshop I attended was presented by Michael Palmer (University of Virgina) titled, "The 5% Rule, or Teaching As a Scholarly Act." The idea being that if one of my teaching goals were to get five percent better at teaching every year, how would I measure my success? Teachers are scholars. We went to school for quite sometime and studied significantly to sharpen our scholarly skills. We can apply the skills to our teaching by researching our teaching and the learning of our students. I've done a little of this in the past, but I'm not doing it currently. I think over the next few weeks I'd like to decide on an area of my teaching to improve (student engagement, learning outcomes, or some such) and start a research project centered around it.

The last session that I'll write about here was presented by Randall Osbourne (Texas State University) titled, "Tolerance for Ambiguity: Knowing Which Students are Better Prepared for the Ambiguity of SoTL Approaches." Without drilling down into the specifics of the research, the theme of this presentation was that students with a higher tolerance for ambiguity (ToA) are more successful in courses designed with a more student-centered approach. Additionally using the active-learning model (ALM) helps to increase ToA and thus student success. This is important for me because I have found the greatest barrier that students face in my class is the ambiguity of some assignments, and maybe integrating some of the ALM techniques will help my students.

In sum, I thought this was a great conference and it really helped me to crystalize my thinking on ways I might improve my course and my teaching. I hope to implement some of these ideas in the coming semester and get started with a new SoTL research project. But next up is the Focus on Teaching and Technology conference at UMSL, and if any colleagues are interested in attending together please let me know.

Where Did September Go?

I can't believe I missed September entirely! I'm not sure how it happened, but let me try to break down where my time last month went:

Bye bye September pie.

By far the largest portion of my time went to sleeping. Even with a new (5 months old today)  baby in the house I spent more time sleeping last month than anything else. Following that was "Family Time" which might sound like fun, but really is mainly wrangling the children shuffling to events, feeding the baby, and breaking up fights. The next one will come as a surprise to my students but I spend about twice as much time grading the junk quality work they turn in as I do teaching. It is the consequence of a learner-centered activity heavy course design. I could just lecture and give multiple choice tests and then I'd have almost no grading to do, but I think my students learn better by having lots of ways to applying the things they learn so instead I slog through 150 (really) of paragraphs about fear, or diagrams of neurons. Even with all that time I am still behind. That could be because of the new time I've been spending on committee work here at the college. This semester I'm on at least two committees (They might be tasks force but I'm not sure. Also is tasks force the correct plural for task force? or is it task forces?) that have required a lot of reading and effort to contribute. I don't begrudge committee work, in fact I actually enjoy it. I mean it. No really. I'm serious. So as you can see from the pie chart there was precious little time for blogging. I have plenty of things to say, so this month I'll sleep less and blog more. I have a lot to say, but what would you like to read more about?

1. Research
2. Teaching
3. My Family
4. Committees
5. Other

Let me know in comments!